Thursday, March 10, 2016

Not sure if I believe this, but...

If you are looking for a reason to support The Donald, and I'm not, you could do worse than to consider whether John Hayward is correct:

Trump definitely doesn’t have trouble staying on offense. He’s already done an amazing job of swatting Bill Clinton aside, after decades of Republicans chasing him around like Wile E. Coyote trying to bag the Road Runner. Maybe he really can maul Hillary Clinton, in a way other Republican candidates would fear to attempt — allowing themselves to be pushed into a beta role where they spend all of 2016 sounding faintly apologetic about daring to run against the First! Woman! President!, as they spent 2008 and 2012 running against the First! Black! President!

For a taste of things to come, consider the Washington Post op-ed flaying Bernie Sanders on feminist grounds — not for rudely talking over Clinton during a debate, but for failing to let her interrupt him. The First! Woman! President! Is entitled to special privileges on the debate stage to compensate for centuries of patriarchal oppression, don’t you know! Good luck trying to lash Donald Trump with this wet-noodle feminist-privilege nonsense. He’ll tear quite a few pages out of Clinton’s playbook and throw them right in her face, then laugh when her friends, donors, and former employees in the media have the vapors over it.

Maybe that approach will hurt Trump more than his supporters believe, if politically-correct attitudes have a death grip on society… but they really want to watch him try it. If he does successfully face down media bias and the feminist battalion of the P.C. army, it could be a game-changer for many other candidates to follow.

And there's more (emphasis in original):

One other thing about Trump’s possible effect on the Democrats: it’s true that if he does manage some sort of cross-party fusion, it could weaken conservatism within the Republican Party.

But it doesn’t have to be that way, and to be brutally honest, the state of the 2016 race so far would suggest conservatism isn’t terribly strong in the GOP right now. We shouldn’t really be surprised, because conservatives have been complaining about how the Party establishment betrays them for a long time, especially since the rise of the Tea Party movement. Trump’s campaign is not the cause of that situation, but a consequence of it.

Let’s knock off the foolishness about President Clinton being better for conservatism than President Trump right now. She won’t listen to conservatives at all. She thinks of them as enemies at best, and turkeys to be carved up for her dependent constituents at worst. If the Democrats win in 2016, they’re going to push hard with a variety of social-engineering techniques to make sure they never lose again. That task will be made much easier if the GOP lies in disarray after a vicious internal battle. You can harbor all kinds of doubts about a Trump presidency, while still accepting that it’s wouldn’t be worse for conservatism than the worst-case scenario of Clinton finishing Obama’s “transformation of America.”

I'm not certain if what Hayward is arguing represents his drinking Kool-Aid out of a brandy snifter, a form of trying to intellectualize vulgarity as a potential for public good. And the idea that Trump represents a potential for political realignment is, at best, a dubious hypotheses. It's quite possible, even likely perhaps, that rank and file Democrats will eat their spinach and dutifully pull the lever for Hillary, but Hayward knows the reason they might not (again, emphasis in original):

And look: a big part of Trump’s appeal is the way he speaks, without reservation, of America as the team he’s playing for, the team he wants to win. That really is an alien idea for the modern Democrat Party, whose ideology is driven by loathing for American history, the multi-culturalist conviction that it’s nothing special (or that it’s especially bad), and the ironclad conviction that grievance is more important than opportunity.

Somehow we’ve reached the point where a slogan like “Make America Great Again” is reflexively spit upon as chauvinist, nationalist, nativist, or even racist. If the idea that America’s President should be one hundred percent focused on what’s best for American citizens, and American taxpayers, finds some purchase in the Democrat coalition, it’s going to tear through them like a computer virus.

If Trump could do no more than convince a substantial number of Democrats to demand solid government value for our tax dollars, it would spark a revolution among blue-collar Democrat voters. They’ve been sedated for generations into accepting ridiculous wastes of tax money, because they think fresh dollars can easily be printed up in the Treasury basement after Obama’s inept mega-government flushes each billion dollars down the toilets of corruption and incompetence. If I were a top Democrat, or one of their Republican Establishment junior partners, I’d be scared to death about the prospect of my voters awakening from that trance.

We'll see about all that. I am pretty certain of this much -- the last two candidates who are likely to be standing at the end of this month will be Trump and Ted Cruz. The ol' GOPe couldn't have envisioned a worst-case scenario that matches what seems likely to happen. A change is coming; what the contours look like is still an open question. Oh, and by the way, read the rest of Hayward's piece.

1 comment:

the GOP is on the verge of realigning itself, if it can get out of its own way.blue collar workers have nobody in their corner, and they are ripe for a political home.

part of the reason i cheer for trump is that i want to see him take on the clintons. i'd would pay money to see those debates, which wont take place because the Clintons will just refuse to take part in any.